


(picture a soul with no leak at the seam)

by Clarice Chiara Sorcha (claricechiarasorcha)



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: General Hux Is Not A Nice Person, Kylo Ren Has Issues, M/M, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Power Dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-17
Updated: 2016-01-17
Packaged: 2018-05-14 11:56:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5742937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/claricechiarasorcha/pseuds/Clarice%20Chiara%20Sorcha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>When he does speak, it comes sudden, harsh. “What makes you believe you will be absolved of your failures while mine will doom me to exile?”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>Hux spares only a slight smile, low and mocking. “Because I am not the one who risks always the attempt at being saved.”</i>
</p><p>In the end, they are very different people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(picture a soul with no leak at the seam)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brodinsons (aeon_entwined)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeon_entwined/gifts).



> I'm just visiting from another fandom -- so, excuse errors of continuity and canon, neither is exactly my specialty when it comes to _Star Wars_. Unfortunately, though, I've developed a fascination for Kylo Ren's half-broken mind and heart, and the steel-forged soul of one General Hux. This is just meta in the form of fic, and I'm likely rehashing territory already long-since covered by far more capable and knowledgeable authors. But. _But_.
> 
> The title comes from Peter Gabriel's [_Mercy Street_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYw9UrsFJa4). Partly it's irony. Partly it's because I find that hilarious. It's about the only funny thing from here on out. I hope you enjoy it anyway.

The sterility of the hospital wing wields an all too vital force. The vicious medicinal scent of it beats behind his eyeballs, splitting through his head with a pain like spreading planetary explosion. But he has remained still in his wait, and he now stands from the seat with aching back ramrod straight, uniform pressed and clean and fresh. The old one, snow-damp and bloodstained, burns in the furnace at the belly of the _Finalizer_.

“How is he?”

The medical droid delivers a litany in droning tone. The logic of it is as water from oiled feathers, blood from a closing wound: Kylo Ren will survive. While the details are useful, they may prove ultimately irrelevant; it is not the wounds that need concern Hux, but rather the manner in which they were acquired.

With a sharp motion of his right hand he dismisses the droid, eyes flicking to the closed door. As ordered, he must go to the communication deck in order to make an updated report to Snoke. Armed with the knowledge he has now, there is no real reason to seek out more.

But then Hux has always preferred to know things for himself. Entering the chamber with neither invitation nor warning, Hux allows the door to snick softly closed at his back without so much as glancing backward. Even and sure as his step is, he draws to a sudden stop, disconcertion burning and bright. He had not expected this. From the low laughter across the room, perhaps the other always had.

“Am I disturbing you, General?”

The voice grates hoarse, and harsh, as if he has been breathing fire and choking on ash. Watchful dark eyes, once so powerful on their own, are now overshadowed by the deep and open wound slashed across the pale skin of his face. It will scar. Hux cannot be certain if that is the point, and realises he would not understand even if it was. He himself needs no such physical reminder of his goals, of what he has paid to travel thus far. Already he has tallied up every little cost and investment. They remain always at the back of his mind, a balance sheet of sin and ambition.

Stepping light as any feline, Hux crosses the room, takes his seat upon the chair on the far side of the bed. “I had thought they would sedate you.”

A scornful twist of those too-wide lips, and Hux doesn’t bother masking his own humourless smirk – nor, indeed, his thoughts entire. He has no sense of the Force, does not even care for its presence in his life. But in the past he has felt Kylo Ren’s mental presence foraging at the edges of his mind. While he senses nothing of that, now, Hux does not doubt Kylo Ren could conceal himself near-completely should he wish to. But he himself has nothing to hide.

This wordless exchange plays out between them with unsettling ease even without the benefit of psychic power. Then, Kylo Ren tilts his head backwards, eyes fixed upon the cold white of the vaulted ceiling.

“I have no wish to be sedated.”

Hux makes no mention of the pharmaceutical trolley he can see across the med bay, its metal and plastic frame twisted nearly beyond recognition. In context he can see how it happened. Even injured, Kylo Ren does not lack for sheer power. “Would you not heal quicker?” he asks, the question trifling and mild; the answer rendered is flat as a floodplain.

“No.”

Most of what Hux understands of the skill and potential of Force users has come to him through Kylo Ren. While he cannot be sure that it is something they all might lack, he has gathered that healing is not a power the Knight possesses. It makes such stubbornness childish and irritating. Neither state is a new revelation in his dealings with the man.

“It will be hours before we arrive at Snoke’s coordinates.” Crossing one leg over the other, Hux smooths out the starched crease of his trousers. “You should marshal your strength.”

“This I can do myself.”

It had been the habit of the Jedi to indulge in meditation – or so Hux assumes, given their propensity for temples and their monk-like lifestyles. Hux has never seen Kylo Ren meditate. He still assumes he would know how. It seems somehow counterintuitive one so attuned to the Dark Side would need to do so.

“Leave me.”

The abrupt command, interrupting his thoughts as it does, draws only a snort from the general. Instead Hux leans closer, eyes narrowed as he begins his own visual examination of Kylo Ren. The full report is available to him, and he will peruse it before he reports their progress to Snoke. But first he will see for himself.

They had removed his outer robes, but preserved enough of his dignity that Hux can see very little of the body that lurks beneath his habitual – and theatrical – styling of dress. A black undertunic and loose linen trousers are all that remain to him. No shoes; it’s somehow strange indeed, to see those large bare feet. Ungainly and oversized both – and yet Hux has seen him move with silent grace across chamber and field, as if he had stolen Skywalker’s very name as well as the last Jedi’s purpose in life.

The most obvious wound is his heavily bandaged side, where he had taken the bolt from the Wookiee’s weapon. A sour kind of admiration rises like gall in his throat; such a weapon had been designed for anti-artillery manoeuvres more than for use against ground personnel. Various other burns and bruises mar the landscape of his body, but there are no actual breaks. Had such extensive and prolonged attack been visited upon anyone other than Kylo Ren, Hux would be transporting a corpse.

“Have you quite satisfied yourself, General?”

The tone, low and mocking, slides from his mind like ice upon heat. “If it bothers you so, Lord Ren, then why do you not simply compel me to leave?”

The upper lip curls in rising sneer. “I have more important matters upon which to concentrate my energies.”

Hux blinks once, and does not move. “Indeed you do.”

The silence that falls has the quality of the air upon the evacuated planet: inherently freezing, but choked with heat and the pulsating metallic taste of nuclear fission. When Kylo Ren speaks he does so in a manner conversational, almost curious. “Do you _wish_ to be compelled?”

Wordless, Hux does not break their eye contact. It is Kylo Ren who does after a long moment, flicking his eyes to the stars beyond the only porthole of the med bay.

“But perhaps you are already a creature of compulsion,” he observes without passion. “Slaved to the memory of the Empire, and to the phoenix arising from its ashes.”

“I have a command.”

His lips quirk, just a little. “At the foot of Snoke.”

“Who is, I believe, _your_ Master yet.”

And he sighs, sudden, even as he smiles. “Very good, General Hux,” he says, and then nothing more. Hux cannot help the brief creasing of his own brow; he is not at all sure what game Kylo Ren has just played. Perhaps it is simply the habit of a Force user. Vague tales of a Jedi’s training seemed to indicate much of it involved riddles and false logic. Hux much prefers his own childhood, one of straightforward lessons where one either succeeded or failed on the basis of their strength of mind and body, not on some precarious link to the intangible and unquantifiable.

“Is he still your Master, then?”

Kylo Ren settles only for an unblinking stare. They are remarkable eyes, rarely exposed as they are. The first time Kylo Ren had removed the mask in his presence, Hux had known why. They are a child’s eyes. In them any fool can see a thousand tangled torndown memories drowning in the darkness of those wide-flared pupils.

When he does speak, it comes sudden, harsh. “What makes you believe you will be absolved of your failures while mine will doom me to exile?”

Hux spares only a slight smile, low and mocking. “Because I am not the one who risks always the attempt at being saved.”

The sudden rattling of the jars and ampoules upon the shelves has the quality of a klaxon siren: penetrating, panicking, insistent as a squalling youngling. Hux remains very still. It troubles him not. With heartrate yet calm and body relaxed, he could be viewing a starstorm from inside the ship. Or watching an entire star system implode at his one given word.

Kylo Ren’s loss of temper subsides as abruptly as it had flared up, the thickened tremor of the air suddenly as mild as his voice. “What are you trying to say?”

“Your family ties are not the advantage you would play them out to be.” The force of his disagreement already blazes in those traitorous eyes; Hux allows him no time to unleash it. “Oh, you will claim that their sentiment will give you unique access to them, and this is true. But what of the reverse?”

“There is no reverse.”

The low fierce growl of the words only makes him smile, tight-lipped and taut. “There cannot be Light without the Dark – is that not what they say?”

“One such as you can know _nothing_ of the Force.”

It is engineered as an insult. Hux only shrugs the well-structured shoulders of his military jacket. “And that is how I would have it be.” His words turn almost jolly now, the tone he’d have used with a snot-nosed first year back during his studies at the Academy. “You have your uses, Lord Ren. But they are inherently possessed of an expiration date.” Leaning back in the chair, he adds with casual cruelty, “They will come for you, one day. Will you go, or will you stay? Perhaps it does not even matter. It only matters that they will do it.” Again he shrugs, the winner of a pointless debate. “I have no such threat to my power and loyalties.”

“I killed my father.”

Harsh and broken as the statement is, Hux only nods with an understanding bordering on condescension. “And I have not killed mine. But had it proved necessary, I would have done so.” Now he allows the mocking to rise, voice light and easy. “And here I would sit, much as I am this moment, carrying his name still. Whereas you – _you_ cannot claim even that.”

The hand closes about his throat, nails digging half-moon grooves into his skin. Hux shivers, but more in surprise than fear. How peculiar to instigate such a deeply personal attack, for one who so very rarely comes closer than the range of his lightsaber.

“Touched a nerve, have I?” he voices around the crush of his larynx. The end of it strangles into silence when Kylo Ren presses just that little bit harder.

“You think yourself perfect.” His face, long and narrow and crowded with mismatched features, hovers but a moment from his own. His breath is sour with pain and fury, hot and biting both. With lips curled back over his teeth, he resembles nothing so much as the rabid dog so many compare him to in frightened whisper. And still, somehow, he smiles. “But you are nothing more than a well-constructed shell. A puppet. Yes, you have everything that would make you useful to the First Order – and to any Empire that arises from its actions. But without drive, you are nothing more than a droid starved of programming.”

His throat has been allowed to open just enough for a single reply. “You say I lack ambition?”

The scorn burns with the sharp cauterisation of his lightsaber blade. “If not for the First Order, you would have nothing to fight for.”

And he can only scoff, even with a killing hold about his throat. But his hands stay relaxed and open at his sides, chin held high. “Do you truly believe that?” Hux asks, and without venom. “You, who created chaos out of order simply to satisfy the urges of a selfish child?”

Flung across the room, Hux lands hard on one hip, his left elbow cracking hard against the floor. He cannot rise immediately, winded; he realises besides that Kylo stalks toward him. In such small space there is no time to bother with movement before Kylo Ren’s towering shadow casts him in darkness.

“Get out.”

He smiles upward, tastes blood from where he had bitten his cheek. “Make me.”

But he doesn’t. There is no movement from him now, either in action or in the Force. Only his ragged breathing cuts through the silence, heaving and harsh. The idiot had denied analgesia the way he had tranquilisation. Resisting the urge to roll his eyes skyward, Hux instead opts for the conversational.

“Is the truth so hard to bear, then, Lord Ren?”

“You are not perfect.”

The intensity of the statement says the forced conviction has more to do with Kylo Ren than with Hux himself. “No-one is,” he grants with magnanimous disinterest, and earns a bitter snarl in return.

“I will be.”

“No, you won’t be.”

Staring, eyes wide in his incredulous face, he almost looks like he might laugh. “Do you not feel fear even now, General? Are you so indoctrinated to the cause that you will thrust yourself willingly upon this sword?”

Hus can see no sign of the hilt of his peculiar lightsaber. But then he has no idea if Kylo Ren speaks metaphorically or literally. “How will you explain my death to Snoke?” he asks instead, and Kylo Ren’s reply comes back mechanical and mild.

“Necessary.”

“Like every other ship or console or Stormtrooper or civilian you have ever destroyed in a fit of adolescent rage?” he asks, but he waits for no reply. “I have failed this day, yes. But I will not fail again.”

Stepping back, now, Kylo Ren turns away with a grimace. “How could I break you?”

It leaves him with the crawling sensation Kylo Ren had been speaking more to himself, even as he levers himself to his feet. Brushing off his uniform to something resembling its earlier pristine cut, Hux spares a faint, humourless smile. “Is that not what your Jedi mindtricks are for?”

Kylo Ren’s back is hunched, narrow, unturned. “I am no Jedi.”

“Well, so they say.”

For such a large and inelegantly constructed creature, Kylo Ren moves with a sudden and easy silence. One hand rises as he does so, but not in violence. The large palm instead comes to encompass Hux’s cheek. The gesture itself, strange as it is, does not startle him overly. It’s the way the pad of one thumb, pressed to the swell of his cheekbone, begins to move in lazy circle that gives him indication to the new direction of their game.

“Oh, so it’s to be rape, then?”

“She thought of it.” His frown belies his confusion; Kylo Ren chuckles, the sound hollow and humourless. “The scavenger. I went into her mind seeking information. She feared not me, but what I might do with her body.” The wide eyes skip sideways, but the distance of memory goes further than that. “I wanted what she _knew_. What interest would I have in such a scrawny little chit of a thing?”

“What, indeed?”

The dry unconcern of his tone draws back Kylo Ren’s wandering attention, fingers tightening upon his chin. “But you…” He shakes his head, the disbelief as worn and weary as any other false promise. “…she is all passion, and fierce yearning desire. _You_ have only endless ambition.” Now he purses those overly generous lips, nose crinkling as if he has scented something rotten. “ _Do_ you have any passion?”

“Not for you.”

“Really.” A hand ghosts along his side, the simple caress of a lover. His reflexes are not those of a Jedi, but Hux catches his wrist, presses hard enough perhaps to hurt. Kylo Ren allows it. When their eyes meet, his lips have resumed again that little smile that can only invoke the thought of a child pulling wings from flies.

“I could make you do it,” he whispers, and Hux lets his wrist go.

“But what would that prove?”

“What, indeed?” His kiss proves surprisingly gentle, with a hint of clumsiness. That is only mildly intriguing. Upon the Knight’s assignation to the ship Hux had never concerned himself with Kylo Ren’s sexual proclivities; he brought no company onboard, and personnel on furlough reported no rumours of it elsewhere. Of course he’d thought it strange, in that he had read of the Sith indulgence in hedonism. It seemed instead Kylo Ren remained the aesthete the Jedi order would have made of him.

Both hands now enclose his face; he has forced Hux to the wall. He can feel the cool of it against every uncomfortable ridge of his spine. Turning his head to one side, he breathes short through his nose, then shakes his head.

“Do we really need to do this?”

Kylo Ren has withdrawn but scant inches, has turned darkly thoughtful. “Yes.”

As always only he would think to be the voice of reason. “You are gravely injured.”

“That is not your concern.”

Forming a light fist, he jabs it out, against the wound. A grunt is his only reply, and Hux’s reward; he can only roll his eyes skyward at the sound.

“It will be, if you cannot perform.”

He’s propelled across the room, again – only this time Kylo Ren accompanies him. The gurney is hardly more comfortable against his back than the wall, but there’s little time to consider it. Kylo Ren clambers over him, a giant spider out of nightmares he had never had never thought to have.

“Shall we?”

Hux enjoys sex where it has been available, with no particular gender preference. And indeed beneath the robes, Kylo Ren possesses a fine enough body: lean muscle, covered over with smooth skin. There’s even some childish pleasure to be had in competing with him as to who can undress the other quicker, with the occasional jab at some bruised and tender spot.

When they are naked, together, Kylo Ren wastes no time in nudging his legs apart. Hux opens them willingly. It makes him draws back, the motion appearing almost unintentional. Hux simply raises an eyebrow, lazy, languid; his blood may be hot, but his heart still beats in the rhythm of a soldier’s marching stride.

“Did you think I would find it demeaning, to be under you?”

He can see enough of his consternation in the way he pauses, long limbs too still for casual thought. Then Kylo Ren snorts, pushes on his knees hard enough to hurt. Hux doesn’t care. The hand on his cock, callused from habitual swordplay, is far more entertaining. There’s two or three long strokes, and then he’s pushing it out of the way, fingertips featherlight over the tender skin of his balls.

“Have you done this before?”

The dark eyes flick up, mouth in petulant scowl. “I will ruin you.”

He only laughs. “If I could be so easily undone by physical violence, Lord Ren, I would never have become General.”

The unkind twist of lips is promise enough on its own. “No,” he says, very low; without the filter of the ridiculous mask, there is strangely musical lilt to his words. “No, I will ruin you for all others, for all time.”

No further words will be spoken, not with those damnable lips now on his cock. Hux must grudgingly admit that perhaps he _has_ done this before; he is not unskilled. Shifting, hips circling with the rising curl of deeper around, he clenches fingers in the single bedsheet. But he sees no weakness in taking pleasure where it is due.

A vague brush of _Ren_ moves somewhere over the surface his mind. At first he spares it no real consideration; Kylo Ren has done such before, from during audiences with Snoke to moments so innocuous as to make such effort seem pointless. But then: a slight pressure against thought and sensation, and he frowns. Then pleasure _flares_ , bright and brilliant. His eyes burst open, lips curving around an inadvertent gasp.

Glancing downward he finds only Kylo Ren: smirking around his cock, hands splayed on his thighs, fingertips pressing hard enough to bruise the virgin-white of his skin. He dips his head again, the riot of his hair a light tease against said skin: but that says nothing of the way his presence reaches _in_ , teasing along the column of Hux’s spine, chasing sensation as it moves from cock to brain, emphasising it, _amplifying_ it.

Hux has never entertained patience with any illicit substance. But he cannot imagine that even the finest of hallucinogenic or euphoric drugs could produce such kaleidoscope of sensation. He is anchored in his body, is aware of Kylo Ren between his legs and the man’s touch on his skin, but all else is irrelevant. This is little more than the act of drowning in decadent delight; even when Kylo Ren presses kisses to his lips, breathing into him, still Hux cannot find enough oxygen to bring back coherent thought.

There’s no sense of entrance; no burn, no drag. Instead he has a vague awareness of the thrust of powerful hips, of his own rising to grind up into them. This is a duel indeed, but his mind is far afield. He can taste blood, and does not know if it is his own; the blood on his hands, slippery over Ren’s back where he rakes his nails down, most definitely comes from the reopened wound in the other man’s side. One lazy hand falls away, and he licks a tongue along the finger; there he discovers an explosion of taste, glitter-bright and piquant.

And now a thousand unseen fingers prowl across his skin, charging a thousand pinpoints of electric sensation. Pleasure crackles between them like the imaginary lines drawn through the stars of a constellation. He makes no effort to ensure Kylo Ren’s own satisfaction, but then he does not care. Confused as his perception may be, his body remains his own; he is still master over himself, and no slave to the wants of another.

Clenching sudden about the cock within him, Hux draws him deeper where he would withdraw. A growling rumble, and teeth press dangerously close to the thump of the carotid artery. Perhaps Kylo Ren can taste the laughter that vibrates in the throat so close to it. It is strange sensation indeed, to feel one of a thousand hands working him to frantic arousal – and yet another, soothing him to whimpering calm.

Without thought Hux reaches down, presses the palm of his own hand hard against the working muscle of a thrusting taut buttock. Everything has become slippery with blood or sweat or the medicinal-bitter lubricant Kylo Ren must have pulled from some cabinet – it matters not which. His index and middle fingers, slick and dripping, thrust between the hard muscle. The heat of him is as a crucible, deep fissure of a volcanic seam; with the jerk of a wrist Hux presses up, seeking with unerring precision that one place that will break the other man all to pieces.

Kylo Ren’s orgasm hits him as sudden and unexpected and brilliant as the half-tamed blade of his lightsaber. Perhaps inevitably he loses his control over what he does to Hux; the collapse of the illusion is catastrophic, as if an orchestra has taken up a single simultaneous note in order to resonate it through every atom of Hux’s strung-out being. His back arches, painfully so. Still it pales by comparison to the pulse of heat low in his belly, skin afire as if it has been scoured down to nothing and nowhere.

Kylo Ren proves heavier than the wiry form might perhaps belie. The dark head is deadweight upon Hux’s shoulder, clammy forehead stuck tight to his collarbone. For a long moment Hux does not move, allows his breath to even, his heart to resume its natural rhythm. Only then does he shove the other man aside. As he stands, Kylo Ren’s long limbs flopping ungainly over the gurney, he notices the blood soaking through the ruined bandage upon his side.

“They did a poor job of that,” he observes with a curt nod towards the damage; with hair hanging sweat-damp in his eyes, Kylo Ren looks at nothing but darkness, face turned towards the ceiling.

“Maybe that is how I wanted it.”

He allows himself the tiniest snort. “Maybe.” Gathering his clothes, he decides not to bother with making his ablutions here; there are dozens of clean uniforms hung neatly in the closet of his chambers, besides. Only when dressed does he glance backward. Kylo Ren has moved only enough to seat himself upon the edge of the gurney, unclothed yet. With head bowed, hands hanging between the ungainly knobbles of his knees, he is as unmoving as any statue carved as warning to the perils of childish whim.

There is no reason to speak. And yet somehow, he cannot resist. “Was it not as you expected?”

Though his face remains masked by angle and shadow, Kylo Ren speaks steady and sure. “No-one else can do what I just did to you.”

“And your point would be?”

Kylo Ren’s disgusted snort is brutal, unrefined. As he pushes to his feet, Hux can clearly see the awkward way in which he carries that more awkward body, its pain rich and burning. After exiting he will insist the droid inject him with some combination of sedative and analgesic, tantrums be damned.

But for now, the agonised steps take him only so far as the small window. They passed the hyperspace connection long ago; now they travel slower, Snoke having refused to allow them to jump the entire distance. Still, a strange blue light not unlike that of the wormhole coats his pale skin with waxy pallor. Hux has seen dead upon their pyres who retained more life than this.

“It’s a pity Starkiller is gone.”

 _Pity_ is perhaps not the word he might have chosen. “Oh?”

“We were the same.” He turns now, this lumbering creature of power and pathos both. “You…you were the base-bound construct: all smooth sleek lines, built to careful plan and engineered for precise use: the well-oiled machine. One need only point, and aim. Then, it would fire – and one would have a clean swathe of destruction stretching over galaxies.”

With hands clasped at the small of his back, Hux arches one eyebrow. “And what were you? The dying star whose fire-riddled heart gave it the ammunition it needed to burn everything to ash and dust?”

In silence, Kylo Ren returns to his contemplation of the empty space they must cross yet. “We will be there soon.” There is nothing left to his voice but weary demand. “Leave me to sleep.”

Hux first returns to his chambers to shower and dress in a fresh uniform. Only then does he take his place upon the efficient order of the bridge. The meeting with Snoke can wait. Kylo Ren is right. They will be there soon. Mistakes have been made. But one battle is not a war. And Kylo Ren had been right about one other thing.

It was for war alone that Hux had been born – and forged.

Nothing else matters, at all.


End file.
